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Tony Zingale, the chairman and former CEO of the software company Jive, has joined the board of ServiceMax, a cloud software company devoted to managing service personnel in the field. ServiceMax will make the announcement formally this week.
Also joining the ServiceMax board is Roger Siboni, the former CEO of Epiphany Software and a former COO of the accounting firm KPMG.
The pair of board additions will likely spur speculation that ServiceMax is headed toward an initial public offering in the near future. Adding two former CEOs with public company experience can’t help but be taken as a signal in that direction. Zingale saw Jive through its 2011 IPO and ran the software firm Mercury Interactive for its final two years as a public company before selling it to Hewlett-Packard for $4.5 billion in 2006. Epiphany went public in 1999 and is now part of Infor.
In an interview with Re/code, ServiceMax CEO Dave Yarnold said what all CEOs say on the subject of IPO plans: That he’s in “no hurry,” and has “no imminent plans,” to take ServiceMax public.
“When it makes sense to IPO, we will,” he said. “That’s not the primary reason we brought Tony on the board. Tony is just a really great resource, and I need lots of those as we continue to grow globally.”
And growing ServiceMax is. When I last checked in with Yarnold a year ago, the company had just landed a $71 million Series E round led by Meritech Capital, at an implied valuation said at the time to be about $450 million. The funding brought its total capital raised to $120 million. Yarnold said the company added 50 new customers in the fourth quarter of 2014. “We’re taking off, and candidly, I want the best people on my team to help us fully take advantage of this opportunity. And I’ve known Tony for a long time.”
The pair worked together at Clarify Software, an early player in customer relationship management software. Yarnold spent four years running North American sales. They’ve stayed in touch ever since.
ServiceMax is a cloud software company that specializes in managing field service personnel, those people who drive around in white vans fixing things like refrigerators, cars, trucks and airplanes.
Most of the time, the software that companies use to handle the process of sending someone to the scene of a problem with all the information he’s likely to need is a home-brewed combination of products that rarely work as desired. A repair tech often shows up to the scene of a job with less-than-complete information, and without the correct replacement part or tool. ServiceMax’s customers include GE, Coca Cola, Tyco and Medtronic.
The app is interesting for another fact: It’s built entirely on Force.com cloud software development platform created by Salesforce.com.
And the opportunity to help field service personnel be more efficient is potentially huge: There are more than five million of them in the U.S. alone and even more around the world. Yarnold has pegged the total market opportunity at $15 billion primarily because there are so many industries with equipment that needs maintenance and repair: Medical equipment, oil and gas infrastructure, elevators, dump trucks.
Zingale retired as Jive’s CEO in November, but remains that company’s executive chairman. Elissa Steele was named CEO last month.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
